Tom Brogan

When you start out writing, or bing creative in any way you have a lot of self doubt. You have to work through that doubt in order to get good. One of my favourite pieces of advice on starting out and the problems you find yourself facing comes from Ira Glass.

 
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Oscar winning screenwriter of 'The Departed' William Monahan spoke to Fast Company magazine on how to write convincing dialogue. He shares some good tips.

Dialogue reveals what characters hide

"Quite decent people often don’t realize that their conversations are not about truth or communication but advancing their own mythologies. Look at what people are trying to conceal, and you’ll see that they’re revealing everything. One of the funniest things in the world these days is that you go...
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Here's some more writers talking about their writing process.

Dave Grohl talked to The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon about how he wrote songs for Foo Fighters' most recent album 'Sonic Highways'.

The band went to eight different cities and eight different studios. After recording instrumentals Grohl would go out to interview someone. Once he had enough interviews he gathered together the transcripts.

"I would pick out words, phrases and sentences from the interviews. Put those on this side ...
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Script Magazine has an archived article from 2004 with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga on the process of writing the film '21 Grams'. It covers the initial nugget of the idea, themes, characters and the film's big questions.

"We all know that one scene has a meaning by itself and a completely different one when it is linked to a scene before and a scene after. I wanted to go beyond the conventional, so I went for symbolic choices. I started writing scenes in a contrasting order, so that the str...
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I'm always interested in a writer's process. In fact, I should start a collection of posts with that as a theme. As such the Creative Spark section of the Academy's YouTube page is a goldmine. They have videos of several screenwriters discussing and showing their various ways of approaching writing.

It's interesting to see how their working methods vary greatly. My favourite of all the videos is this one from Oscar winning write of 'Milk' Dustin Lance Black. His approach to outlining is in...
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Patton Oswalt again, this time in Rolling Stone talking about ten films that defined him. His new book 'Silver Screen Fiend' about spending his days watching films is now out. 
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Art of the Title published their top ten title sequences of 2014.

"For our list of the top 10 title sequences released in 2014, Art of the Title’s editors chose from among film, television, video games, conferences, and whatever category Too Many Cooks fits into."

On the list is the title sequence for possibly my favourite new US TV show of 2014, True Detective.

HBO's True Detective - Main Title Sequence from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.

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Here's a photograph I took at the football this afternoon. Sometimes you can get an interesting image if you turn away from the action on the pitch. I just thought the silhouette looked quite nice here.


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"Podcasts! There's a million of them and they’re all amazing!" So said Parks and Recreation's Tom Haverford. Here's a round-up of a few podcasts I've been listening to recently.

Song Exploder

In Song Exploder songwriters discuss how they wrote a particular song and play some of the individual tracks the songs is made up of. The latest episode features Matt Berninger and Aaron Dessner of The National discussing 'Sea of Love' from 2013's 'Trouble Will Find Me'. There's also a weekly newslette...
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